Beheaded

La Strada was an Italian restaurant in name only. The proprietors and employees were all Mexican, and the menu a medley of Mexican, Greek, Cuban, Chinese, Japanese, Cajun, and Southern, with a few a few token Italian dishes thrown in. An incongruously large chandelier hung from the ceiling, and on the walls the décor consisted of colorful sombreros, old photos of Pancho Villa look-alikes, and faded posters of mariachis entertaining Gringo tourists. The Mexican family that had bought the restaurant from the original Italian owners the year before apparently had not gotten around to changing, or couldn’t afford to, the big neon sign over the entrance flashing the name, La Strada, the street, in Italian. So La Strada it remained, rather than the Spanish La Calle, or some other Spanish moniker.

It was after 2:00 p.m., past the busy hour, and the last diners were leaving when my wife, Ann, our 17-year-old grandson, Alex, and our home-remodeling contractor, Michael Perruno, and I arrived. We had just hired Perruno to remodel the kitchen of our newly purchased home in Dawson, North Carolina. To celebrate the deal, Perruno had invited us for lunch at La Strada and driven us there in his late model Cadillac El Dorado.

A construction worker in my younger days, I could easily have done the remodeling job myself, but with Ann and me trying to get a post-retirement antique business off the ground, we decided to hire a contractor instead, and Mike Perruno, introducing himself as a cost-cutting Yankee entrepreneur, was the one who offered us the best deal within our limited budget. For expanding the space of the kitchen, tiling the floor and installing new cherry cabinets, stainless steel appliances, and granite counter tops, Perruno’s fee came to modest $20,000.

Yet, there was something about that lump of a man, 400+ lbs, a white cowboy ever perched on his bald pate—he even wore it indoors—that had rubbed me the wrong way from day one. Later, to our regret, we would learn that he was a career conman; that his credential and references were all fake; that never in the course of his 50-year life had he held and honest job or run a legitimate business; that he’d been arrested twenty two times in eight different states for offenses ranging from forgery to auto theft to sexual abuse, yet was never convicted. Either he had underworld connections to buy off or intimidate witnesses, maybe judges and prosecutors as well, was a protected FBI snitch, or just plain clever. Whatever the case, once I realized that pressing charges against him would be futile, that we wouldn’t get one cent of our money back, that he was human vermin, I decided to kill him. But I’m getting ahead of myself.

Mike Perruno waddled up to the proprietor of the restaurant, a burly, raven-haired man in his 40’s named Pedro who, calculator in hand, was busy tallying up receipts at a table. The fat man stood stiffly before Pedro, clearing his throat, his eyes saying, “Hey, I’m here,” but Pedro, pretending not to hear, took a while to acknowledge his presence.

“Oh, hello, Mike,” he finally said. “Welcome. Table for four? Follow me, please.”

Pedro ushered us to a table under a mariachi poster and handed each of us a menu. Then, bowing politely but without a hint of cordiality in his voice, said: “The waitress will be with you in a minute,”

In what seemed a half-hour minute, the waitress, a gaspingly beautiful girl in her teens, emerged from the kitchen to take order. Judging from her features, it was obvious that she was the daughter of Pedro and the comely woman—-Berta, the name tag on her shirt read—-working the cash register. Unlike her father, the girl spoke unaccented English, probably came to America at a very young age, or was born here.

Even less cordial than her father and unable to affect his civility, the girl said to Perruno: “Hi, Mike, welcome.” Then turning to us: “May I take your order?”

“We’ll have the buffet,” please.” said Ann. “Everything looks delicious.

“And interesting, too” I added. “Great variety.”

Mike Perruno ogled the girl up and down. “Ever seen such pretty dark eyes and brown legs? Carmen here is the most beautiful señoreeta in all of North Carolina, and smart as a whip, too. Had me one just like her when I lived in Mexico a few years back. American girls today, they can’t compare. No beauty, no charm, no sex appeal. Everything’s been bred out of them. Hell, I’d ask Carmen here to move in with me, if I wasn’t so goddam old.”

Carmen scowled a scowl of utter disgust, as if smelling spoiled food and, averting her gaze from Perruno, asked us: “What would you like to drink?

“Just water, please, and a milk for him,” said Ann pointing to Alex, who had meanwhile served himself at the buffet bar a heaping plate of everything from black beans to meatballs, and was busy consuming it, so he could back go for seconds.

As Alex ate and Carmen took down the order, the two exchanged normal boy-girl looks, each blushing noticeably. This and the grandmotherly tone in Ann’s voice softened Carmen a bit. She flicked us a smile, and turned toward the kitchen to get us our drinks.

“Hey, you forgot me!” Perruno called after her. “Me, I want an iced tea, with lots of sugar. You know, the way I like my women, real sweet.”

Perruno laughed and gazed across the table at us, expecting us to laugh too, but none of us found his humor funny. Without turning around, Carmen gestured to the fat man that she had heard him, and continued on into the kitchen.

We served ourselves at the buffet bar and sat at the table to eat, Perruno wolfing down his portion, going back for seconds, wolfing that down too, and then back for thirds. This last portion, ravioli and cherry pie, he ate at a normal pace, belching, grinning, saying excuse me, and belching again.

Presently, the two cooks and the bus boy also came to the table, muttered a cheerless “Hi, Mike. Welcome” and went back to work.

Berta was the only who did not come to welcome Perruno. She remained seated behind the counter, polishing a serving fork, holding it up to the light and, finding it less than immaculate, then polishing it some more.

It was Pedro who brought out the drinks, explaining that Carmen, a high-school senior, had to go home and study for a math test. She had applied to NC State and needed to make to make an A on the test to boost her GPA.

Ann asked Pedro what part of Mexico he was from. Querétaro, Pedro said, and with me joining in, the three of us fell into a conversation in Spanish. Though American-born and raised, Ann had learned to speak the language as a graduate student in Spain, and later as a senior translator for the UN, she became fluent in it, along with French and German. Me, I had learned Spanish as a child in my native Cuba and could still speak it, though I was out of practice. Ann had visited Mexico on official business and was familiar with Pedro’s hometown. So I let her do most the talking.

Mike Perruno had meanwhile stopped eating and was glaring up at the ceiling, rolling his eyes, convulsively clenching and unclenching his fists. Suddenly, he sat bolt upright in his chair, flabby torso aquiver, as if he had swallowed a pole. We gaped at the fat man with alarm. Was he suffering a stroke? A heart attack? An epileptic seizure? I was about to reach for my cell phone to call for an ambulance, when Perruno nostrils flaring, teeth bared, lunged at Pedro, snarling into his face:

“Goddammit! You know I don’t speak no fukin’ Spanish! When I bring customers here you talk English. No español! English! Understand? Comprende? English!”

For all the years that Perruno claimed to have lived in Mexico, he could not understand, much less speak Spanish, save for a few scattered words. Being left out of the conversation, unable to dominate it, together with the suspicion that Pedro might be telling us something he didn’t want us to hear, had infuriated him

His anger somewhat abated, the fat man sat back down and, after staring for a long moment at a mariachi poster on the wall, he resumed shoveling food into his mouth, forkfuls of ravioli with one hand, heavily buttered buns with the other.

Ann and I looked across the table at Perruno, up at Pedro, at each other, back at Perruno, too stunned to speak, my last swallow of enchilada bobbing indecisively between peristalsis and regurgitation. Why would the fat man lash out like that at Pedro, humiliate him in front of his wife and customers? What was he trying to prove? Was the guy crazy? On drugs?

Finally, keeping my voice soft, as much to control my own anger as to keep Perruno from going ballistic again, I said: “Mike, what’s your problem? Pedro was just telling us how he learned the restaurant business in Mexico. That was all. And what’s wrong with talking Spanish. It’s my native language, too.”

“Yes, Mike,” chimed in Ann. “What is your problem? Pedro wasn’t saying anything bad about you. You didn’t even figure in our conversation. The subject was Pedro and his family, not you.”

Had they been in Mexico, Pedro might have broken Perruno’s jaw, but this being America, the land of law and order and trial lawyers, Pedro knew that if he so much as touched Perruno, or even made an offensive remark, he might end up in jail, or be sued for everything he had, and maybe sent back to Mexico. So Pedro just stood there clenching and unclenching his thick fists, glowering down at Mike Perruno. The two cooks and the bus boy, on hearing the commotion, had emerged from the kitchen, likewise clenching their fists and glowering at Perruno, wishing this were happening in Mexico instead of America.

Pedro’s wife Berta, though, did more than glower. Brandishing the serving fork she had been polishing, she dashed out from behind the counter, her comely face now ugly with fury. Like most people who learn a second language later in life, the more emotional she got, the more broken the English that came out of her mouth.

“You bad man!” she shrieked. “You come here, give trouble. Why someone don keel you, I don know. Get out, now, and don come back!”

Perruno realized that he had screwed up, not that he was in the wrong, but that in our eyes, his new customers, he had made a bad impression. Not good for business. Ignoring Berta, or not daring to confront her, the serving fork in her hand too close to his face for comfort, he rose from the table and, glancing down at the us, making sure that we were watching, apologized to Pedro profusely.

“Hey, amigo. You know me. Chingada! Can’t help it if I’m a hot-blooded Italiano. You know I don’t mean no harm. Forgive me? Todo bueno between us. No?”

Like most ignorant people, the fat man assumed that foreigners would understand and like him better if he tried to sound like them, not realizing that it had the opposite effect. Convinced that he had duly atoned for the outburst, he pulled out a roll of bills from his pocket, and laid two 50’s on the table.

“Lookie here, Pedro. Dinero.! One, a tip for Carmen and one for the dinner, la comida. And keep the change. Muy bien? You and me still amigo? No?”

“Don take hees monee, Pedro!” Berta ordered. “He no good. He can’t buy us. His monee is dirtee.!”

Perruno didn’t insist on Pedro keeping the money. Snatching the two 50’s from the table, he put them back in his pocket and, muttering something about stupid Mexican pride, waddled out of the restaurant and went to sit in his El Dorado to wait for us.

Ann and I waited for Alex to finish eating, his teen-age appetite unaffected by the ugly incident, then went to pay the bill at the counter, where Berta, still fuming, was jabbing with the serving fork in the direction of the chair where Mike Perruno had been feeding.

“Señora,” Ann said to her in Spanish, “We understand why you don’t want Perruno’s money, seeing the way he treated your husband, but please accept ours. We came to your restaurant, enjoyed a delicious meal, and would feel very bad if we left without paying you.” And tendering handing Berta her credit card: “So we ask you, please, let us pay the bill.”

Realizing that we were not at fault, Berta demurred for a moment, her dark eyes gradually softening. “Muy bien,” she finally said and, adding up the total of the four buffet meals, handed us the bill. With the $10 tip, it came to a reasonable $46.55.

As we turned toward the front door, Berta said: Vuelvan pronto. Pero sin ese hombre.” (Come again soon. But without that man.)

The fat man was seated in his El Dorado munching on a cream cheese bagel he had helped himself to as he passed the buffet bar on his way out of the restaurant. Getting into the El Dorado, Ann and Alex in the back seat, and I in the front, I shot Perruno a hard look, expecting an explanation for the outburst in the restaurant or, at least, an apology for ruining our dinner. But Perruno made no mention it, he just sat there, grinning, picking his teeth, as if nothing out of the ordinary had happened.

Coño!.” I swore to myself in Spanish. “What kind of man is this? Why that scowl of revulsion in young Carmen’s face when she took our order? What did Berta mean when she said that his money was dirty? Why her urge to impale him with the serving fork?”

“Where to now?” the fat man asked, a smile snaking across his jowls.

“Home,” Ann and I said.

But Mike Perruno didn’t drive us straight home, only five minutes away. First, he took he took us on a grand tour of the urban sprawl that Dawson had become, slowing down every couple of blocks and pointing to some house, building or empty lot, his shrill New Hampshire brogue growing shriller and more grating by the minute. .

“See that there brick house? Built it from scratch last year, for a friend, a former mayor and state senator. For under 80 grand, the whole thing, including them magnolias in the front yard.”

“That two-story frame house. It was falling apart. Dry rot, termites everywhere. For only 50 grand I remodeled it, put on high-grade vinyl siding, and look at it now. A showcase home. Got the weather-proof windows, worth 20 grand, by trading them for some old kitchen appliances I had in my boathouse. Hell, a deal is a deal.”

“This upscale neighborhood we are driving into, only millionaires live here. Look at them cars in the driveways, nothing but Cadillacs, Mercedeses, and Lexuses, two in each driveway. The neighborhood was developed by a mogul associate of mine from California who once hired me to build custom homes out there. All got fountains and gazebos in the back yard. As part of the deal he let me have one of the homes, the three story job you see there on your left. I sat on the property for a while until the value went up, and then sold at a 300 percent profit.”

“That big office building you see over there. Used to be a shirt factory back in them days when Dawson was a whistle-stop town. The city was gonna condemn it when I bought it, for practically nothing. Cost me 200 grand to renovate it, then sold it for three million and a half. That was three years ago. Today it’s worth twice that. And you know what my biggest cost was? Labor. Had to bring in a work crew from Mexico.”

A sneer of contempt creased Perruno’s face as he launched into a tirade against Southerners. “Them rednecks around here couldn’t be trusted for a big job like that. Half of them drunks or crackheads. In and out of jail. Pay them on Friday and you don’t see them again for a week, if they come back at all. When they do work, they’re slow and do a half-assed job. Always have to stay on top of them. Not worth the money and aggravation. Mexicans, they are different. Like I told you, you’ll find out soon enough what these goddam Southerners are like.”

From the frequent stops along the grand tour, it appeared that Michael Perruno had either built, remodeled or owned half of Dawson as well as of scores of other communities throughout the United States, Canada and Mexico. Everywhere he said he had been—and he claimed to have been everywhere—the fat man had left his mark. His intelligence and skills were prodigious, and everybody loved him.

Perruno pulled up his El Dorado behind our Toyota Civic. We didn’t invite to come in the house, but he followed us in, anyway, and, making himself at home in the living room, plopped his 400+ lbs our down on Ann’s antique Chippendale chair. “Don’t sit there!” Ann ordered him, alarmed by the creaking of the 200-year-old wood. “On the sofa, please.”

Perruno moved to the sofa, his huge buttocks occupying most of the sitting space and, as if we were still riding in the El Dorado, started blustering again, this time about the original Rembrandt paintings he claimed to have hanging in a Las Vegas fine arts museum. And the more he blustered and lied, and the more I studied his features, the more I suspected he might be a fraud.

His hands, for one, were soft and well manicured, like a woman’s, with finely bejeweled rings on the pinkies and index fingers, not the kind of hands one would envision handling rugged construction tools. His girth, too, was not that of a man who had once done a lot physical work, no solid layer of muscle underneath the fat, just the fat alone, soft, flabby, quivery, andropausal. Nor was his gait that a man accustomed to walking around construction sites. The extra 200 or so pounds he toted around had so weakened his knees that rather than walked he half hobbled, half waddled, like penguin with a limp, and only a few yards at a time, before having to stop for a rest.

But, then, I figured, why should any of that matter? Construction workers nowadays have machines and power tools to do the tough work. They don’t need to be as hardy as those of my generation who did their sawing with hand saws and digging with picks and shovels. Besides, the man said he was a contractor, not a worker. A nonstop talker like him could conduct his business from a squeaky-clean pickup, with nothing more than a cellular phone. He didn’t need to be slim. He didn’t need a strong pair of legs. He could sport fine jewelry, have soft, well-manicured hands, and still get the job done. For now, I would give him the benefit of the doubt.

Next day, while Ann worked in her vegetable garden, I went for lunch back to La Strada, curious to learn the story behind the incident with Mike Perruno. It being lunch hour, the place was packed. A ballad that could have been Mexican, Cuban or Country Western, but was neither, wafted softly from the speakers above the posters of mustachioed Pancho Villa look-alikes and Mariachi’s entertaining blond tourists. While waiting to be seated, I struck up a conversation with Berta, who was working the cash register, a constant smile on her comely face, the smile indicating that much more money was coming into La Strada’s coffers than going out. Busy in the dining area, also smiling, beaming, her husband Pedro doubled up as bus boy and maitre d’.

“That pelón (baldy), he’s an evil man,” Berta was telling me, her smile having changed to a sneer when I mentioned Perruno. “I don’t know what connection you have with him. That’s your business. But be warned. Whatever it is, he’s up to no good. Think of your wife and grandson. Ann and Alex, if I recall.”

Impressed that she remembered their names, I smiled, and she smiled back.. “I liked them a lot. You’re good people. You don’t deserve to be hurt by a thug like Michael Perruno. But, as I said, it’s not my business. I’m sure you know what you’re doing.”

Three customers came to the cash register to pay their bill, I waited until they were done, then turned to Berta. “Tell me, señora, why do you dislike Perruno so much? What did he do to you?”

The smile that had reappeared on Berta’s face while tending to the customers changed back to a sneer, an uglier one this time, as if a foul odor had suddenly assaulted her nose. “What did he do to us, you ask? To be honest, I don’t want to talk about it. It’s too repugnant.” Then, after a pause, she said despite herself, “but so you’ll know what kind of man that pelón is, I’ll tell you anyway.”

Berta glanced at Pedro clearing a table on the other side of the room, her eyes asking if it was alright to talk freely with the old man standing by the cash register. Pedro had recognized me when I walked in, and recalling how Ann and I had sided with him in the incident with Peruno, he nodded yes, the man is one of us, a fellow Hispanic, tell him everything.

Berta nodded back to her husband, turned to me and, lowering her voice, explained: “When we opened for business last year we got behind on our bills. Perruno somehow found out, or maybe guessed it, and showed up one day with an offer to make the payments in exchange for $2,000 worth of meals and odd jobs around his house. That way, he said, there would be no cash transactions and no legal or tax complications. Just an exchange of favors between friends. He claimed he was a multimillionaire lawyer and knew how to make such deals for businesses in financial trouble. Always helping people like us, he kept saying.”

Berta paused again, obviously searching for the right words to go on with the story without demeaning herself. “Well,” she said at length, “next day Perruno shows up with a contract and three well-dressed men confirming that he was legitimate and telling us how lucky we were to have him as our financial adviser. If anyone could save our business, it was Mike Perruno. Stupidly, we signed the contract. It didn’t occur to us that an older Americano who owns a house right here in Dawson and drives around in a luxury car— a Cadillac now, last year a Lexus—could be such an evil person.” And crossing herself, she added: “A thief and a pervert.”

Afraid that Berta might yet change her mind and leave out best part, I waited a moment for her to gather her thoughts, then locking eyes with her, pressed: “What happened then, Señora? Tell me.”

Berta’s eyes narrowed. “The fat pelón made the first monthly payments, as he agreed, but on the second month he didn’t pay. Meanwhile, we had spend what little we had on a used oven, so when the creditors called demanding their money, we had nothing to give them. Pedro then went to Perruno’s house to ask him why he hadn’t complied with his side the deal—for our part, we had been feeding him all month, sometimes twice a day—and do you know what he told Pedro?

“No, what did he tell him?”

“He told him that we had tricked him, that the meals and odd jobs couldn’t begin to cover the cost of paying our bills. Pedro reminded him that it was he, not us, who came up the idea, but Perruno would not listen. Either we agreed to give him more favors or he would continue to default on the payments, and we would lose our credit and all hope of ever getting a loan of any kind in this country.”

“What new favors did he ask for,” I asked, almost afraid to hear. “You called him a pervert.”

“Carmen, our seventeen-year old daughter,” Berta said, averting her eyes and dropping her voice to a near whisper, painfully embarrassed by the words coming out her mouth. “Mike Perruno wanted sexual favors from Carmen . . . Of the oral kind.” Then raising her voice to normal: “Imagine how her father felt when he heard that. He should have killed Perruno on the spot, and in Mexico he would have, but here in America things are different. Family honor is not issue. Pedro would have ended up in prison with ordinary criminals. Besides, there were no witnesses. So Pedro just warned him to stay away from Carmen and left. Perruno realized that Pedro would draw the line where his daughter was concerned and he never brought up the sexual favor thing again.”

Berta’s gaze turned to a large, androgynous woman with an incongruously dainty demeanor who had just finished eating and was approaching to pay her bill. While Berta attended to the woman who, upon closer inspection, turned out to be a man in drag, three more customers walked in. Managing a friendly smile, despite the ugly recollection of Perruno flashing like a bad migraine inside her head, Berta greeted the customers: “Smoking or non-smoking?”

“Non-smoking,” said the customers.

“Please have seat,” said Berta, gesturing toward the serape upholstered bench in the foyer across the cash register. “My name is Berta. Our host, Pedro, will show you to your table in few minutes.” Then resuming her conversation with me: “After that, Perruno made three monthly payments, as he agreed, which bought us enough time to start earning the money to pay the bills ourselves, so we told him we didn’t need him anymore. Yet he kept coming back, though not as frequently as before, eating for free and insisting that we owed him more favors, that the document we signed was an open-ended contract that gave him the power to take over the restaurant and sell it any time he wished.”

“You realize, of course,” I said, “that such a contract would not stand up in court. He would be the one who ends up in prison if he tried to enforce it. Next time he comes in to eat, tell him to get out, and if he refuses, call the police. Here in America you have the same legal rights as any citizen.”

“We know that, of course, but here in America you need a lawyer for everything. Perruno no doubt has a lawyer, so we would have to hire one too, at $300 an hour, which we couldn’t afford. And if his lawyer happened to be more clever than ours, then we would surely lose everything we have, law or no law. Besides, two of the men working in the kitchen, relatives of Pedro, don’t have their legal papers yet. Perruno knows this and could report them to Immigration, and also turn us in for having hired illegal aliens, although we could argue that since they are the ones we sent one day to do odd jobs for him, that he hired them too. But that would be too much trouble. Our strategy is to let the fat pelón be. When he comes in for his free meal, we keep him waiting half an hour before serving him, and give him nothing but leftovers. (Berta didn’t mention that Julio, the cook, also spit on his food.) We figured that eventually he’ll get tired and stop coming.”

“When he brought us here the other day,” I reminded her, “everybody greeted him politely.”

“That’s because that morning he came by and paid everybody $20 to come to his table and say “Hi, Mike” to him and, if you’ll recall, everybody did except me. I took his $20 because he owed us, but there was no way I was going to pretend that I was glad to see him.” And her voice dripping with sarcasm, she bowed before an imaginary Perruno, saying: “Hi, Mr. Mike, you great, wonderful, generous man. Welcome to our humble restaurant.”

I chuckled. “Yes, I remember. “I though you were going to skewer him with that serving fork you were polishing.” Then with feigned seriousness: “Would you have, skewered him, if you could have gotten away with it?”

Berta laughed: “You know, Señor, I probably would have. But how about you. You don’t seem to like him either, yet you came here for dinner together. Of course, that’s none of my business. You must have your reasons.”

“We’re not friends, or partners, or anything like that,” I said without going into detail. “He’s doing a small job for me. That’s all. Once he finishes it, I pay him, and we part company.”

Seeing her husband making ushering gestures toward a corner table across the room, she said:. “Your table is ready, Señor. Hope you enjoy your meal. The Cuban special: rice, black beans, fried ripe plantains, and yuca con mojo is especially good. What Pedro and I had for lunch today.”

A week passed with no word or sign from Mike Perruno. I then phoned him to inquire why he hadn’t started work on the kitchen, and he rudely informed that we had deliberately underpaid him, cheated him in effect, and in order to finished job he would need another $15,000, plus an additional $10,000 to reimburse him from money he had to pay out his own pocket to purchase materials.

There was no question now that the Yankee entrepreneur was a crook as I had suspected. From a retired professor in whom he had conned out his family’s life savings the year before, I later learned that he been arrested a number of times for various offenses but never tried or convicted. The retired professor, one Felipe Romero, a fellow Cuban, it turned out, had pressed charges against Perruno, but because the Dawson police lost, or said they lost, the reams of evidence and witness list that he had provided them, the judge dismissed the case. So I knew that taking the conman to court would pointless, that the only way to bring him to justice was to kill the son-of-a bitch myself.

The act of killing a man was not new to me. During my two tours in Vietnam I had killed my share of enemy fighters, but I never took satisfaction or pride in it. The medals I received for my deeds in the line of duty had lain in a closed box in our attic for forty years. The enemy I killed were mostly kids like myself caught in the same nightmare not of our making. In times of peace we might have been close friends. Years later it dawned on me that the ones who need killing are the home-grown crooks who plant the seeds of ill-will that germinate into war. Over time, I learned to recognize such crooks, but had prudently refrained from taking action against them. But now, older and fading, I was yearning for the opportunity to dispatch at least one crook before I departed from this world, and Mike Perruno fit the bill as well as any. Had he known about my military background and feelings, he probably wouldn’t have dared to con us, but he never asked, and I never told him.

In the same box in the attic where I kept my medals I kept two handguns, a .45 1911 A1 pistol, the standard sidearm of U.S. military officers, and a .38 Police Special revolver. The .45 was by far the better killing weapon, but it was registered in my name, while the .38 was a 1920”s vintage piece I had bought from a friend who had smuggled it in from Mexico. Though it was highly unlikely that bullet fragments could be traced to my .45, I decided to play it safe and use instead the less powerful but unregistered .38. After the execution, I would hide the revolver in the crawl space of our house as an extra precaution.

Besides, I wouldn’t be the only suspect. Career conmen like Perruno tend to make enemies, not all of whom are inclined to turn the other cheek. From the retired Cuban professor I further learned that Perruno was a gambling addict, and that to feed his habit, he had incurred huge debts to loan sharks and casino operators, debts which he was reluctant to pay in full, or not at all. So the list of people who’d want to kill him must have been quite long.

The place I chose for the execution was Perruno’s own house. I had been there a number of times before and was familiar with its layout. Wearing a laborer’s outfit so as not to attract attention I rang the front doorbell, but no one answered. I then went around to the back door and finding it unlocked walked into house. The conman, I figured, would be at the PC in his office planning his next job. So I would silently walk in on in him, catch him by surprise and shoot him, but not to kill right away. I wanted him to live long enough to see who had shot him and regret the day he conned us, before finishing him off with a second shot.

But then the stench of death hit me, War veterans over time tend to forget the sights and sounds of war, but never the stench. That sickening odor emanating from Perruno’s office I recognized at once from my stint in Vietnam forty years earlier.

Mike Perruno body was half sitting, half lying against the wall behind his desk. By color and limpness of the body and strength of the stench it was evident that the conman had dead for several days. A darkish soup of coagulated, blood, gore, urine, feces and undigested food soiled the rug around the corpse. The shotgun blasts that had killed Perruno had literally blown away his huge belly and pelvis. And for good measure, or sport, or for some demonic reason, whoever killed him had decapitated him after the bleeding stopped and neatly placed his signature cowboy hat in the gash where the head had been.

Next day the story broke in the Channel 9 Morning News. Perruno’s house cleaner, a relative of the owners of La Strada, discovered the body. The shotgun that killed him was identified by the police as a 12 gauge, and the beheading instrument a meat cleaver or a machete. The severed head, however, was nowhere to be found. The police surmised that the killer had taken it with him as a trophy, or some Satanic ritual.